This story may be long, so if it is, I apologize. These events took place during 6 months of my freshman year of high school. It is important to note, I had just come from homeschooling, and the school I was going to had 2,500 students; this for me was a culture shock. I was socially impaired, and I did not make friends easily. As a side note, I was, and am, generally very shy quiet and awkward.
My freshman year of high school, I was in a math class for students at a 6th grade level. Most of the kids in this class were troublemakers and weren’t very smart. I definitely did not fit in with this group of students, but there was another girl in the class like me. One day, as we were forced into group work, we became class-friends. This girls name is Jessica.
Jessica can be described as a larger Hispanic girl who wore glasses. She was a year older than me. She loved writing novellas, and often times we would go the library during class where she would tell me the stories of her novels. I wasn’t terribly interested in the complex storylines, but I was happy to have a friend.
One day, as we sat in the library, she told me about Mark. He was a friend of hers, and the photo she showed me of him was dream worthy. This of course led me to ask lots of questions about him.
She told me he went to our school, but I had never seen him before. When I brought this up she would get so defensive I would go along with it. For a bit, I teased her that he was fake. However, after weeks of her defending his existence, I decided no one was crazy enough to make someone up that vigorously and so I believed her.
At that point in time, she told me he was interested in me. We began to text.
Shortly after we started talking, he moved to Montana to live with his aunt and his cousin Ruby. I found the timing suspicious, but I dismissed my concerns having been blinded my my attraction for him. He asked me to be his girlfriend long distance, and I agreed. We texted constantly, and there was always lots of drama with his cousin who would take his phone and tell me how she would steal him away from me. Some conversations were personal.
I felt slightly suspicious when Jessica began to ask about some of the personal things I told him, but I figured he was just bad at keeping his mouth shut. Despite anything strange, we continued to speak during the summer. At that point I had stopped speaking to Jessica.
Things really got creepy when I started noticing his photos were of different people. When I noticed they were from Google. I accused him but he always had excuses. Eventually, I stopped talking to him because I didn’t know who I was really talking to.
It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I figured it all out. It had been Jessica the whole time. Every personal thing I had sent, had been to her. Mark was fake, just as I had always thought. For the girl who had been so good at creating detailed and intricate stories, characters that almost seemed too real… I had fallen right into her strange trap. I may never know why she pretended to be him, and after that year we never spoke again. I just hope we never meet again.